George R. R. Martin Didn’t Work on Nightflyers

George R. R. Martin Didn’t Work on ‘Nightflyers.’ It Shows

DECEMBER 29, 2018

The new Syfy series Nightflyers is based on a novella by George R. R. Martin that was first published back in 1980. Fantasy author Erin Lindsey says that the original story feels dated, but that it displays a basic storytelling competence that the show never really achieves.

“The things that I didn’t like about the Martin novella were details, at the end of the day, but I thought the bones were good, and in a certain way this is the reverse,” Lindsey says in Episode 341 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Some of the details are cool, but they can’t make up for the fact that the bones aren’t there.”

Science fiction author Matthew Kressel notes that Nightflyers never really moves beyond recycling familiar elements from better movies and TV shows.

“To me it just felt like someone was unfamiliar with the tropes of science fiction,” he says. “I felt like they watched a lot of science fiction movies and TV and said, ‘Oh, that would be cool, that would be cool, that would be cool.’ But it never really cohered into a solid narrative.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxyhost David Barr Kirtley had high hopes for Nightflyers, but was disappointed to learn that George R. R. Martin was barely involved with the show. “He says that he heard they were making this show and he was like, ‘How can they do that? I haven’t given them the rights,'” Kirtley says. “And it turned out that he had sold the rights as part of the contract for the 1987 feature film and he hadn’t even realized it.”

TV writer Andrea Kail says that Nightflyers lacks any sort of creative vision, and that the show just seems to be trying to cash in on Martin’s name.

“The beauty of Game of Thrones is that [David] Benioff and [D.B.] Weiss were huge fans of the books,” she says. “They went after George and said, ‘We want to do this.’ It was a passion project for them. This didn’t feel like a passion project for anybody.”

Listen to the complete interview with Erin Lindsey, Matthew Kressel, and Andrea Kail in Episode 341 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

David Barr Kirtley on the Nightflyers feature film:

“The novella was adapted into a 1987 movie that was so stunningly successful that the director used a pseudonym so that nobody would know he had directed it. Around this time George R. R. Martin had published his fourth novel, The Armageddon Rag, which was a pretty cool book but an enormous commercial failure. His writing career had been going so well that he had bought a house, and now he couldn’t afford his house anymore, so he was deeply in debt. He told the New York Times that he had actually started taking classes to become a real estate agent, and he would have become a real estate agent if the money from this movie hadn’t come along and pulled him out of debt. And I think that’s probably the only thing that anybody will ever be glad about this movie for.”

Matthew Kressel on worldbuilding:

“The only way they can communicate with the [aliens] is by bringing along a psychic, which sounds perfectly reasonable, except the psychic is literally a psychopath—at least that’s how they present him from the get-go. And I’m like, ‘Why would they bring this completely unstable psychopath with them on this journey which is the last best hope of humanity? Can’t they find a more stable psychic?’ I didn’t quite get that. And then they bring him on board in this giant cage, and he looks through the window and messes with someone’s brain, so it’s like, ‘Well, what’s the point of the cage then?’ I don’t understand why they’re even locking him away if he can literally just ‘think outside the box’ and fry someone’s brain.”

Erin Lindsey on storytelling:

“The Expanse is a really good example of a show hitting its stride where they got a lot of the little details not great in the first couple of seasons. Some of the acting was bad, a lot of the dialogue was terrible. But you can forgive those things if the story drives you forward, if there’s a clear sense that if you have questions, as a viewer, that the show makers have answers—and that you feel that they have answers—and that they’re going to be satisfying answers when you finally get them. That’s what keeps you going forward in the story. And there’s no forward momentum in [Nightflyers], because what the characters are trying to achieve as a team is unclear, and their personal motivations are also largely unclear.”

David Barr Kirtley on Syfy:

“I had high hopes for this show. I want Syfy to succeed. I want there to be a science fiction channel on television. I want there to be shows set in outer space. I think the idea of a horror show set on a spaceship is cool. I had high expectations for this, and I was all set to like it. … Syfy has announced that they’re doing a bunch of classic science fiction. They have Hyperion, Gateway, and Ringworld, and I think even other things—Brave New World I think they were doing?—all in development. And obviously something went wrong with this show, and I just really hope that whatever it is gets sorted out before they give a similar treatment to something like Hyperion. That would just break my heart.”

WIRED